Gaashk
1mo ago
I wouldn't necessarily read too much into it. If I were going to make a culture war statement, it would be about saftyism, rather than willingness to walk, even with the two year old (though it's really annoying to walk with a tired two year old). The kids went on a two mile hike with us to find an ancient cliff ruin that we heard about from a stranger in a bar the other day. They can probably go trick or treating when they're old enough to take initiative about it.
Gaashk
1mo ago
We were Evangelical homeschoolers when I was Trick-or-Treating age, and also didn't have any neighborhood friends, so I guess I don't have any trick or treat golden age to look back on.
My impression is that there's an ideal age range for real trick or treating, and that my kids (5, 2, and not eating solids yet) are a bit young still. I saw some kids doing it last year, I think three total, so it would be a bit of an adventure, people don't signal if they're giving treats or not. I haven't had a single kid try at my house in four years.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Maybe I was getting it confused with All Souls Day/Day of the Dead, which is more popular in my region.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Possibly, but my neighborhood is kind of weird, everyone’s house is way behind their fence, so we would have to drive. There is a pretty good neighborhood haunted house only on Halloween, though.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Trunk or treat with the kids, boo at the zoo, visit the Day of the Dead memorials around Old Town Plaza. They say they put up 20,000 marigolds, it looks lovely. Apparently daughter’s going on a field trip where an Orchestra from Mexico will perform and talk about the music from Coco.
Gaashk
1mo ago
They had a volunteer English program to boost English exposure a decade or so, and I was young and unattached, so I cotaught at an elementary school for room and board. I enjoyed it a lot (less so the teaching, but the class load was pretty light), and am Orthodox Christian, so they took me to a bunch of feast days for the various churches, and I ended up at a lot of supras.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I’ve spent a year there. They have fantastic toasting parties! I liked just about every person I met, and it is beautiful.
Gaashk
2mo ago
My Greek Orthodox godmother, who was at church multiple times a week enjoyed astrology and reading fortunes in cups of Greek coffee turned upside-down. She was generally not a stupid woman.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I recently enjoyed this article about goiter in Switzerland posted on the SSC board https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil
Gaashk
2mo ago
The new cars don’t come with the option of lap belt only, and the one time I picked the four year old up having forgotten the car seat, she complained about how uncomfortable it was the whole way home.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I'm not hugely into poetry, but my impression from the poetry I do like is that it's more like tuneless song, and that in the ancient world it was often chanted or intoned, and also used to aid memory. I really enjoy Byzantine and Arabic liturgical forms, for instance, traditionally chanted in 8 tones on a rotating schedule. There's an akathist tea I hope to be able to rejoin sometime, where women get together, publicly read an akathist in a circle, and then all have lovely aesthetic tea cakes with pretty cups and loose flowers steeping in glass teapots. Among somewhat modern poets, my favorite is TS Eliot, mostly because the words just sound so good, but even he has to be read aloud. Fundamentally, I think that poetry is more or less liturgical, rather than trying to express views in compressed formats -- it's meant for public ceremonies, and even things like preforming Shakespeare are more that than they are just hearing a story. My favorite Shakespeare class consisted almost entirely of just reading plays about King Henry around the room and then sitting there and letting the sound of the words sink in.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing
Maybe you're low in Big 5 trait Openness, though I think that's unusual among people who spend their free time on free speech message boards. Apparently they've found two aspects that aren't entirely dependent -- aesthetics and intellect, so maybe you're pretty low on the aesthetics side. Or you just haven't traveled to places that are right for you?
Tomorrow we might try taking the kids to a mountain, a ruin, and a lava field. My whole family gets depressed and angry if we stay near home for too many days in a row.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Baby and small child problems might not be a very productive line of conversation.
The current status quo of everyone having quite effective birth control all the time is probably not a good idea. I was newly married and on contraceptive pills that I didn't manage to renew quite on time when first baby was conceived. Maybe subconsciously I wasn't trying very hard to keep on top of the birth control, but was still surprised, because it was only for a couple of days and I was past 30. The other two children I had to go to a doctor and remove an implant, so more intentional (and I was clearly not put off having more children), and then I was pregnant two months later. If I were more conscientious, I would probably have waited another couple of years and only ended up with only two, confirming society is probably selecting for not very conscientious mothers who conceive quickly.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Yeah, I could see that.
I will say that mothers of infants have a bunch of hormones going off, oriented towards getting them to treat a crying baby as an emergency. Breastfeeding mothers, especially, won't necessarily benefit from putting the baby off, they get dripping hurting breasts, a baby who's flailing around in all directions, and general mayhem. Many babies like to cluster feed, and will cry until they get to, and it's awful. Baby #3 is getting 6 oz formula a day during evening cluster feed before bed time (out of ~24 oz total), and it is making a noticeable improvement in quality of life.
Currently the three week old is lying on the floor crying about tummy time while I'm commenting here. Various articles suggest that I could "play" with him, or lay next to him and cheer him on. But I don't want to do that, and attempts to try with his older sister suggest that the crying lasts about as long either way. He would probably not even exist if I really thought following all the interactive suggestions from various articles was mandatory.
On the other hand, I have found our older child legitimately very difficult as a baby and toddler, for reasons that seem to come down to energy level. She was born in a one room apartment without an enclosed yard or playground within walking distance. I do have some sympathy for why many people would prefer not to do that, because it was kind of terrible. If she got woken up in the evening, she would proceed to scream for the next two hours, and nothing we could do would stop her. My husband had to take care of her for several months, and she would refuse a bottle, then proceed to scream at him for hours about how he didn't have any milky breasts. She learned to speak at 2, and has been chattering nonstop ever since. Now she's 5, we have an expansive yard with different whole areas in it, and I have a lot of sympathy for the kind of parent that locks their kid out of the house for outside play time.
I have no intention of ever owning the kind of high strung dog that wants to be taken for walks twice a day and keeps jumping the fence. We don't have a dog, actually, because they're too much effort, in some ways more than children. At least if we go on a trip we can take the children with us, and if they step on thorns we can tell them to wear shoes. The children would like a dog, but we don't have anyone to look after it if we're away, and we are away at least several weeks a year.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Car seats are annoying. We're going to have to get one without arm rests, doing the seatbelt buckles are just too frustrating.
Gaashk
2mo ago
This sounds like a just so story. Have you observed it? The 30 year old women of my acquaintance who seem like maybe they should be settling down but are instead running 5ks, climbing mountains, and drinking fancy cocktails do not necessarily have strong Instagram presences. Also, engagements, marriages, babies, and cute little kids get a lot of positive attention on social media. More than anything other than running social media as an actual business. The mom influencers are generally pro-natal -- they make having children look more aesthetic than it really is.
Gaashk
2mo ago
This resonates with the way people I know actually seem to talk and think in a way the "status" conversation doesn't.
I have some friends who can't have a biological child because of health issues the wife is facing. They're otherwise parentally inclined, and have been fostering unrelated children the past several years, and this is a really sad thing for them. But not as sad as dying in childbirth or becoming permanently disabled, so they probably wouldn't prefer the world where the options were to join a convent or roll the dice.
Another friend from a while back didn't want children because she had a ton of mental and physical health problems in just about every member of her family, and that seemed reasonable to me. As far as I know she hasn't married, and might not. That's also sad, but then so is raising a child only for them to turn into a crazy homeless person or take up everyone else's entire life managing their psychosis.
It doesn't really help to inflate the misery of childbearing, though. Personally, I didn't mind being pregnant, and the worst part of babies was/is feeding them. Inconveniently, it's hard to know how things will go until trying, and bad results can really mess up a person's life.
Agree with others that having to entertain a 4 year old all the time is some combination of poor choices on the adults' part and an unfortunate consequence of being the only person there with a child around that age. Possibly with a side of talking a lot about incomprehensible far away things as a social default, vs cooking or hiking or something that makes sense to children. Not that I don't have sympathy for having to deal with constant interruptions, but it's not helpful to think of guiding children through learning social skills as "entertaining" them. I am constantly annoyed that I have a large, interesting yard, and my 5 year ld mostly just wants to talk to me about her virtual cupcakes or something. That is, unfortunately, largely my own fault though.
My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age.
That's very sad. Like the discussion on the Wellness Wednesday thread about dementia, some experiences are tragic, in a society that tries to ignore that kind of small everyday tragedy.
It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation.
This part is probably unnecessary, though. I knew some teenage girls once, with a sister who had profound health challenges, which kept her homebound and in need of constant support. Because finding a home health aid was too difficult, the sisters had to learn to be nursing aids at a young age, and often missed school to care for her. Their father hated it, and moved to another state. Last I heard one of the girls had moved to her father's house. It was both very sad, and looked from the outside like some poor choices had been made, perhaps pressed upon people. We seem to be in a healthcare uncanny valley for some conditions, where people are kept alive at the expense of everyone around them when in previous generations they would have gotten a fever and died young, and maybe at some point in the future they could be cured. That's not an unmitigated good.
It's almost never a good idea for a family to let everything revolve around even a very miserable, sickly, disabled child. It's too bad she couldn't have more non autistic children, more going on in the household, maybe eventually they'll figure out how to not let their whole lives be ruled by caring for that child.
I don't know if the "fertility crisis" is a crisis or not. It's unsurprising that in a civilization with very little mandatory difficult and dangerous work, women would be opting out of having children as well. But for most, it's probably not for the best long term.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised if this had a net negative effect on fertility.
The debt would come due when the adult children were thinking of starting a family of their own. That's completely different from the traditional situation of helping one's elderly parents for free while living in their house, or them moving into their grown children's house and helping with the grandkids. The better and more together parents would probably just give the money back, but there would be deadweight loss from it passing through government accounting. Plenty of parents are still helping their grown children out a bit now and then into their 30s, voluntarily. The ones to keep it would probably be toe worst quality parents overall, or their well off kids would offer to help them voluntarily.
Gaashk
2mo ago
I guess?
My main experience of an American city with respectable public transport is Chicago. On the one hand, I took the metra and L a lot, and mostly liked them. On the other hand, locals had very strong opinions and advice about where it was and wasn't safe to bike/walk/park/stop at stop signs, which effects functionality a fair bit. I ended up parking at a relative's private apartment garage because he wasn't using it, but it was kind of a fluke that was was an option.
Gaashk
2mo ago
Which is nice until your car is stolen. There’s a nice little train to a neighboring city I want to take my kids on, but theft at the parking lot for it is too high, so we drive an hour instead.
That’s what I remember. I think all the OCEAN traits are bell curve, they give results by percentile.
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